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View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by The University of Mississippi SOUL FOOD: AN INTERPRETATION OF THE HISTORY, SIGNIFICANCE AND SOUTHERN ROOTS OF THE AMERICAN CUISINE by Sarah Bracy Penn A thesis submitted to the faculty of The University of Mississippi in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the Sally McDonnell Barksdale Honors College. Oxford April 2015 Approved by __________________________________ Advisor: Professor Willard Rose __________________________________ Reader: Professor Curtis Wilkie __________________________________ Reader: Doctor Charles Mitchell © 2015 Sarah Bracy Penn ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii For Cenell and Nadine, whose unwavering pride, unconditional love and collard greens showed me what “soul” really is. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I’d like to thank the many culinary historians, journalists and masterminds who answered each and every question I threw at them. Your voices provide the power of this project. Thank you, Susan Puckett, for showing me that food is much more than just something we eat. It is an incredible avenue to share intimate stories and personal histories. Without that realization, this thesis would not have come to fruition. To Curtis Wilkie, Kathleen Wickham and Ellen Meacham, thank you for being sticklers for perfection. Under your direction, I grew to become a better writer than I ever imagined I could be. To Will Norton and Charlie Mitchell, thank you for always giving the best advice. To my family, thank you for your constant support, even when you knew those all-nighters were a bad idea. Finally, I am eternally grateful to Bill Rose, whose guidance and supervision as an editor and mentor have shaped me into a true journalist. iv ABSTRACT Soul Food: An Interpretation of the History, Significance and Southern Roots of the American Cuisine (Under the direction of Willard Rose) This thesis is a collection of stories in which I explored several facets of soul food, the hybrid cuisine of Africa and the American South. It uses soul food as a prism to view issues of race, class, politics, economics, history and social consequences. Rather than write an academic paper, I presented my findings in a series of articles based on live interviews with food historians, culinary writers, entrepreneurs and chefs. I also examined various books, articles and blogs written by these culinary writers. This is not a comprehensive history of the cuisine, nor does it attempt to take sides with any of the groups that argue about the precise definition of what soul food is. Instead, this thesis explores those definitions, along with the societal issues that go along with them, in classic journalistic fashion. In short, this thesis demonstrates that soul food has complex meanings far beyond its taste. v TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………………………….…..1 CHAPTER 1: AN INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY AND CONTEMPORARY INTERPRETATIONS OF SOUL FOOD.…………………………...……………3 CHAPTER 2: THE ACCULTURATION AND APPROPRIATION OF SOUL FOOD.…………………..………………………………………….....………….14 CHAPTER 3: DISAPPEARING SOUL FOOD...…………………………….....………20 CHAPTER 4: SOUL FOOD AS A SOCIAL CONNECTOR.……………...…………...25 CHAPTER 5: HEALTHY SOUL FOOD……..……………………………...……….…30 CHAPTER 6: WHOSE FOOD IS IT, ANYWAY?…………………..……...…………..36 CONCLUSION………………………..……………………………………...………….40 REFERENCE LIST…………………....……………………………………...…………42 vi Introduction Soul food—it’s one of America’s most storied and emotionally charged cuisines. Despite its simple ingredients and preparation techniques, the food’s underlying meanings and connections are utterly complex and at times, unexplainable. Over the last two decades, it has picked up enormous steam, popping up on white- tablecloth restaurant menus across the nation and inciting a craze of foodie literature. Some writers choose to reinvigorate or, to the chagrin of champions of food justice, reinvent the cuisine altogether. On the flip side, some of the nation’s legendary soul food spots, like in New York City’s Harlem and Chicago’s South Side, are closing shop. For a food with such humble beginnings, soul food has traveled quite the journey. Its roots are in Africa, and later the food was adapted with cabin cooking techniques. Soul food is connected to a time when the American South was plagued by one of the most brutal institutions in history—slavery. But just as many people, at least in the South, are united on taste, food critics and historians can be bitterly divided on everything from soul food’s origins to its future. How can such a simple food engender so much disagreement? This thesis confronts the many sides of the soul food debate. It seeks to shed light on that question by probing the origins of soul food, its evolution over more than 100 years and its highly charged emotional baggage. I have written a series of six stories composed in true journalistic fashion, gathering my research from African-American 1 historians, food writers and culinary justice experts. Topics range from soul food’s origins and contemporary interpretations of the cuisine, issues of acculturation and appropriation, the rapid shut-down of soul food institutions in America’s metropolises, the food’s power of social connectivity, healthy takes on traditional recipes and finally, the debate of soul food’s ownership. Through these stories, I have demonstrated the complexity of soul food, its tenacious ability to please the palate, its social importance, its ability to both unify and divide, and its key role in the history of the southern half of the country. It is an old, old story, and it is far from over. If nothing else, soul food has proven once again that good food has staying power, no matter the disagreements that swirl about it. 2 Chapter 1: An Introduction to the History and Contemporary Interpretations of Soul Food Growing up in Louisiana, the heart of my home was the kitchen. By design, it was made for congregation. More often than not, our dinner table spread included collard greens, butter beans, sweet potatoes and homemade cornbread. The smell of a browning roux was the all call to convene for SEC football on Saturday nights, while Sundays inevitably ended with grease stains spotting my church dress after a fried chicken luncheon. This was my soul food. Once, in Cleveland, Mississippi, I dined at The Senator’s Place, a Mississippi Delta icon that serves up home cooked soul food to locals and tourists alike. State Sen.Willie Simmons, the restaurant’s namesake and owner, walked me through the buffet line of classic southern fare. I asked the apron-clad woman behind the line for a chicken drumstick, a dish of greens and a piece of cornbread. As I took the plate from her with a smile, I almost drooled with delight. This was my Sunday meal. It was like coming home. The senator then prodded me with a question, snapping me out of my momentary enchantment. “I bet you’ve never eaten neck bones before,” the senator said. “You can’t have soul food without neck bones.” No, I had never eaten neck bones, and I’d eaten soul food my whole life from my grandmother’s kitchen table. But in this realization came an even larger one—soul food 3 also symbolizes a people, a movement, a way of life which I did not, and could not, understand from my personal and familial histories. As it turns out, there is much more to soul food than meets the eye. To food historians, culinary experts and soul food aficionados who have sliced and diced the cuisine to reveal its many facets, soul food is what African-Americans had available to them when there wasn’t much else. In the days of slavery, it epitomized the culinary genius and inventiveness of the African-American woman who could take the sparse leavings from the master’s table and whip up a meal strong enough to sustain the family through the long plantation workdays. The cuisine then traveled north, where it steadily persisted in the kitchens of black migrants and then boomed within certain civil rights circles. Today, this simple food has endured to become the subject of scholarly work. In recent years, foodies have churned out trendy books that suggest the evolution of soul food is a lens through which to view the evolution of the African-American community. As might be expected, not everyone agrees. There’s at least two sides, and arguably more, to the soul food debate. The sides are epitomized by the socially and politically constructed cuisine that links to civil rights and, on the flip side, an attempt to promote black cultural awareness through linking this food to necessity, survival and a triumph of culinary creativity in the slave cabin and later, in the homes of white employers. For over 50 years, the dominant narrative of soul food defined it as a cuisine of necessity, the only food available. But there’s one man who is striving to change that interpretation, and in doing so, has stirred up a new one. 4 Adrian Miller, attorney and self-proclaimed “soul food scholar,” published Soul Food: The Surprising Story of an American Cuisine, One Plate at a Time in 2013, a provocative revision of history that sent immediate ripples through the tight community of those who study such things. His goal: to redefine the accepted history of soul food as poverty food. The result: a following of readers who now see the cuisine as a celebration of the American South. “The dominant narrative is that it’s poverty food. But if you actually go back through the history, most of this food is celebration food of the rural South,” Miller said. “I’m saying that, essentially, the black migrants who left the South during the Great Migration…this is the food they brought with them.” According to Nicholas Lemann, author of The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America, the Great Migration was “one of the largest and most rapid mass internal movements of people in history.” From 1910 to 1970, more than six million African-Americans fled the rural South for urban areas of the north.

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